


Archive

by Monochromely



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Gen, Pearlrose Mentions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:49:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28454142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Monochromely/pseuds/Monochromely
Summary: As a part of the extensive process for documenting the war, Pearl and Blue Diamond prepare to have a conversation about Pink.
Comments: 13
Kudos: 46





	Archive

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thesometimeswarrior](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesometimeswarrior/gifts).



> My gift to thesometimeswarrior for our holiday gift exchange. Dani, you're a wonderful writer and an amazing friend, and I'm so lucky to have you in my life.
> 
>  **Prompt:** One of the Diamonds interacts with a Pearl (either “our” Pearl, our “their” Pearl) post-CYM

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” Steven reminds her for the fifteenth time since he woke up this morning and bounded down from the loft to interrupt her daily newspaper reading. He’s sitting on the corner of her desk in Little Homeschool now, one of his jacket sleeves scrunched up at the elbow and the other rolled down, leveling her a serious look beneath his bushy brow, mouth pressed into a thin line.

It strikes Pearl suddenly, and for no readily available reason, that her little boy has grown up somewhere in the space and span of two measly years.

Soon, if he keeps growing, he’ll be even taller than she is.

“Yes, you’ve made sure I’m aware of that,” she returns wryly, absently reshuffling her notes again. They’re half-English, half-gem glyph in a shorthand that only she understands, alternating languages from line to line depending on when glyphs were not sufficient enough to capture all those once-foreign concepts to gemkind: love, romance, the depths of sacrifice. Gems didn’t need symbols to encode for these complex sensations, even if they felt them, and perhaps especially if they did.

It was scary to love someone on Homeworld.

It was terrifying to love them so powerfully that you would risk your very gem for them.

Traitors were duly punished.

Survivors were rare in Era One.

(Garnet can attest to that.)

“I’m just sayin’,” he protests playfully, sounding rather like Amethyst, and even resembling her when he raises both of his palms in mock surrender. “I know this project is important and all, but it’s not as important as me knowing that you’re comfortable…”

Pearl places her papers down and straightens them neatly, all the while feeling the force of Steven’s expectant gaze.

The strength of his love.

It warms her all over.

It colors her pale face.

But when she finally glances up at him, even though her cheeks are assuredly pink, she keeps her voice and resolve firm.

(Though she’ll never say this to him, not now, not anymore—never again—he reminds her so much of his mother sometimes.)

(His kindness, his warmth, his _goodness_.)

(Because Rose wasn’t all bad—not really. Not to her, at least.)

“I’m fine, Steven,” she reassures him. “I _promise._ I wouldn’t have agreed in the first place if I wasn’t. This isn’t the first time I’ve done one of these recordings, and it won’t be the last either.”

“But never about… _this_ , you know”—he makes a vague pointing gesture with his hand, struggling for the right words—“and never with a _Diamond_.”

He says the word _Diamond_ nervously, like it’s one of the expletives that Amethyst has gotten more comfortable in dropping now that Steven is a bonafide teenager, and he’s simply waiting to see Pearl’s response, how she’ll react.

She certainly did give Amethyst one hell of a scolding the other day.

“ _This_ is history,” she returns quietly. “It’s painful history, yes… but that can’t be helped.”

“But it can!” He argues pointedly, his eyes wide and incredulous, his voice scratched around its strained edges. “You don’t _have_ to share the things that have hurt you for the entire galaxy to see, Pearl. That isn’t what this is all about.”

“But I _want_ to.” And there’s a sense of finality in her tone that closes a mouth that had already been half-wrenched open in preemptive protest. Pearl takes the opportunity to reach over then and place a hand on Steven’s jean-enclosed knee, smiling gently. “Of course, there are a couple of details I’ll keep to myself—keep between you and me—but for the most part, I’m ready to tell this part of the story. Indeed, I think it’s essential that I do.”

“For archival purposes?” Steven asks dryly, resignation in his voice, a little teenage petulance, too.

Pearl pats his knee once, laughs lightly, and then withdraws her hand.

“For _closure_ ,” she says simply, but then, because she knows it’s not enough for him, and she _wants_ it to be enough for him, elaborates. Explains. (It isn’t quite justification, though.) “Two years ago, I was bound by your mother’s final command to never talk about what we did. And most of the time, I didn’t want to… I don’t think I could have forced myself to even if I tried. As you got older, though, as you learned more about your mother and all of her many… _complexities_ …as you began to have questions—so many important questions—I knew I needed to but _couldn’t_. And now…”

“You have a choice,” Steven finishes for her, realization washing across his face, unbending the protective sharpness in it.

“Exactly,” she nods approvingly, “and so I’ve thought about it… I’ve weighed everything out carefully… and I’ve come to the conclusion that this is what I want—to claim our history… eventhough it’s painful, even if it still hurts. I’ve had trouble doing that before, even with secrets in my own volition, and I don’t want… I _refuse_ to let that be me anymore, Steven. I don’t want to live with thousands-year old ghosts anymore.”

Though his brow remains furrowed, though there’s something in the dark of his eyes that remains a little unsure, Steven nonetheless blinks to show that he’s heard her and nods solemnly to indicate that he understands.

It’s a simple gesture.

It means a lot.

And she smiles at him in radiant, weary relief.

A few months ago, Homeworld and Little Homeschool scholars had a conference to determine how best to record, preserve, and proliferate the history of the war, and all the events that resulted in Era Three. There are extensive gaps in Homeworld’s own archives, which had been scrubbed free of mentions of it in obedience to Yellow Diamond’s commands, and Little Homeschool, of course, being relatively new, doesn’t have an archive so much as it has a file cabinet in Pearl’s office that’s at the very least meticulously alphabetized. And so, they decided upon creating a universally accessible Archive, a series of recordings and documents and interviews delivered by gems and humans from both sides of the war, giving accounts of all that has happened in six thousand elapsed years.

Most of the Crystal Gems have done several recordings.

Garnet, Bismuth, and Pearl did one just last week on the Battle of the Ziggurat.

Biggs and a few other defected Homeworld soldiers have covered some of the minor battles.

Yellow and Blue Pearl have recorded a few on what it was like to be in the palace during the war.

And even the Diamonds themselves have proffered their perspectives whenever they’ve had the time.

Because the scholars emphasized early on that it was essential for all sides of the story to be brought to the table in order for the universe to get the fullest canvas of what it meant that Pink Diamond started a war that her half-human son would one day finish.

The minutiae of Homeworld politics.

All of the many battles.

The rebellion.

The beauty of Earth.

The aching desolation of Homeworld after the faked shattering.

Gems’ encounters with humans.

Humans’ encounters with gems.

The casualties.

The grief.

And what that does to a gem—to hold her comrade’s shards in her hands.

What it does to people.

The various townies have given their accounts of what it was like to live through alien invasion after alien invasion, to see their beloved Beach City upended so many times, right before their eyes.

_War._

“When does it start?” Steven asks in a would-be-casual voice, straightening up from her desk and stretching his arms over his head before pulling them back down again. With a meticulousness she fancies he inherited from her, he finally fixes his sleeves, dragging the cuff of his left arm to perfectly match the length of the other.

“In ten minutes,” she replies.

“Do you want me to stay?” Lines crease his eyes even as he offers it. “I can if you need me to.”

He glances at the still dormant Holo-Crystal on the desk and just as quickly glances away, finding her face.

Searching her own gaze, even at the very moment she searches his, the both of them looking for something to be concerned about and unfailingly finding love.

Pearl knows for a fact that he doesn’t want to listen, that he’d rather not hear the sordid story all over again.

He’s seen it.

Goodness, he’s half-lived it through the mire of her own head.

But she also knows that if she asked him to, he would do it.

Just for her.

He’s selfless like that.

He’s _Steven._

“Go,” she smiles softly at him, leaning back in her chair. “Get out of here. If you and Amethyst will grab the stuff from the store, I’ll make cookies for dessert tonight.”

Steven returns the gesture crookedly, and the relief in his eyes is almost mistakable for excitement.

“Chocolate chip?” His voice young, almost childlike.

“Do you even need to ask?” Her voice fond, always motherly.

“Thanks, Pearl!” He chuckles. He half-skips. He snatches his car keys from the desk and all but slaps the door handle. “Love you.”

“Love you too.”

He winks his final goodbye, twists the knob and in a brief flash of golden sunlight, disappears into the day. The door clicks to a merry close behind the shuffle and haste of his heels.

And Pearl is left alone, hands templed delicately in her lap, staring at a deadened Holo-Crystal that’s lying almost forlornly on its side.

Her smile slips away from her mouth like falling sand the moment she thinks she’s safe.

She shuffles her papers again.

She stares, very quietly, at the crystal.

She looks, just as pointedly, away.

Occupies herself by touching her notes again, raking her fingers over all the words that give a form to the one secret she had kept to herself for thousands upon thousands of years—not entirely out of her own will.

She wasn’t lying to Steven when she said that she wanted to do this.

She was lying about the fact that she was _fine_ to do it.

Somehow, in the tangle of her own head, it makes sense to her that these sensations are not mutually exclusive. It’s perfectly compatible to want to do something that’s scary and still feel intensely scared about doing it.

Fear doesn’t stop at the threshold of a made decision.

After all, if fear had ever stopped her from doing what she wanted, then she would have never loved Rose Quartz.

So she stares at the Holo-Crystal, and then she emphatically doesn’t.

Tries to distract herself.

(Eight minutes til…. seven.)

Fails.

Abruptly gets out of her chair, a sudden restlessness in her lanky limbs, and begins to pace the floor, sunlight from the nearby window dusting her skin gold in square patches, in slivers. When only one minute remains, and the Holo-Crystal suddenly glows a bright, electric blue as a warning alert to a scheduled call, she throws herself back into the chair as forcibly as possible and tries to arrange her face into an expression that’s just as equally cool.

Focused.

Put together.

_Fifty seconds…_

She pushes a hand through her hair and hates herself for doing so; assuredly, she just ruffled it, and now her hair will be a rumpled mess on a hologram for time immemorial.

_Thirty seconds…_

What in stars’ name does she do with her hands? Arrange them on the desk? Temple them on her lap? Place them stiffly by her sides? She settles for some awkward combination of the three—templing them on the smooth surface of her desk with her elbows at stiff angles.

It’s highly uncomfortable.

_Twenty seconds…_

She could bail now, and Steven wouldn’t think the worse of her for it. She’d join him at the beach house after he returned from the grocery store, and he’d help her make the cookie dough and never say a word as to her cowardice. Perhaps he would even be relieved that she decided not to go through with her intentions in the first place. After all, they weren’t strictly necessary… that was one of his arguments even… someone else could do it… could tell her story… and it would all be the same.

_Ten seconds…_

But _she_ wouldn’t be relieved.

 _She_ wouldn’t be proud of herself.

She could live with herself, yes, but she wouldn’t be able to forget that when the opportunity came to speak her truth freely, she refused to, denying a voice that had already been long denied.

So many times over.

From the very first moment she emerged into the world as a gem whose highest and only pleasure was to serve.

 _Five seconds…_ the Holo-Crystal begins to blink rapidly, throwing its frenetic hues in quick pulses across her desk.

And so she _has_ to do this then.

_Four seconds…_

She _wants_ to.

_Three seconds…_

It’s her narrative and no one else’s.

_Two seconds…_

Not even Rose’s.

_One second…_

Maybe especially not hers, even if she isn’t ready to admit that yet, to face that raw fact.

In a diamond shaped burst of energy, the Holo-Crystal throws its projection upwards with a series of gem glyphs that she reads with both trepidation and ease: ACCEPT FEED? YES OR NO?

Breaking the solemn temple of her fingers, swallowing her electric, jangling nerves, Pearl, against all her better judgment, presses _yes_ , and the glyphs fall away, replaced by a live portrait of a gem who somehow looks exactly like Pearl feels.

Arctic eyes wide.

Charcoaled beneath with thousands of years worth of shadows.

Brow furrowed with indecision.

With hesitancy.

With all the indelicate trappings of fear.

“Blue Diamond,” Pearl greets coolly, jerking her head in a stiff nod. Somewhere deep in her gem, an odd impulse to salute pulls at her facets.

“Pearl,” the Diamond returns softly, almost wonderingly—as though the name is unfamiliar on her tongue. In a way, it likely is. The Diamonds once viewed the Pearls as objects as opposed to gems and referred to them in such a way.

The Pearls.

Our Pearls.

They were interchangeable.

They were possessions.

In the Reef, they even came with accessories: staffs and wands and batons.

“Thank you for consenting to do this,” Pearl continues in that same clipped but professional tone. “I think this will be an important entry in the Archive.”

“Aye,” comes the quiet reply, thoughtful. “Yellow and White don’t quite understand it entirely yet, but there is rationality in this—in proffering the fullest account of our history for anyone to access it if they so choose. It’s about preserving _her_ … all of our legacies—the good, the bad, and the ugly.”

Pearl is suddenly reminded that of the three remaining Diamonds, Blue was the one who upheld the human zoo, who perceived it as a relic and immortalized it as such.

Steven had told her about all of those bubbled Rose Quartzes.

Dozens of them.

Hundreds.

Made to cover the illusion of Rose’s identity.

Punished for a crime that they didn’t perpetrate.

Perfectly preserved in stasis and purgatory for thousands of aching years.

“And so often the ugly,” Pearl emphasizes scathingly, and it’s a condemnation of them all—of Rose for making the Quartzes, of Pearl for being complicit, of Blue Diamond for imprisoning them and calling it mercy.

“Yes,” Blue agrees faintly, new lines forming beneath her eyes. “We did some terrible things…”

Her demureness and her honesty irritate Pearl for some reason—perhaps because she didn’t expect them, or perhaps because she very well did and still finds that they ring false, insincere, affected. How could they not in the face of millennia worth of cruelty and injustice? How can two years of positive growth overturn the effects of two hundred thousand?

Perhaps it’s simply that she believes in action as correctives and atonements.

Perhaps she doesn’t trust mere words, even though this is what this entire event is all about in the end— _mere words._

Perhaps she wants to see it in Blue Diamond’s eyes for herself—the change in them, the repentance.

And perhaps, at the very same time, she doesn’t want to look too closely in case she finds precisely what she’s looking for.

“Yes,” she repeats primly. “You did, and today is about looking backwards to that, about assessing all the things we did and didn’t do—on both sides of the war.”

Blue Diamond absorbs this all quietly, looking downwards, strands of silvery-blue hair falling from her neat parting and across her tall forehead.

“How exactly do we do that?” She asks. “Where do we even begin?”

Admittedly, they’re both excellent questions, and now it’s Pearl’s turn to glance down, to recognize the scrawl of all her neatly organized notes and suddenly realize that they feel insufficient for the task at hand, bare.

The word _love_ crops up so many times, but nothing is said about the overwhelming force of that love—the all-consuming dimensions of it.

How Pearl would have been content to stay in Rose’s presence forever, and that alone would have been enough.

And how _complicated_ that same love was.

How it was sometimes tangled in programming and servitude.

And how at other times, it was dangerous, bold, revolutionary, _transcendent._

And how it hurt sometimes.

Perhaps even all the time.

Love so deep that it felt like pain.

Even English doesn’t have the capacity to describe those complexities of emotion.

Even language itself.

“Well,” she begins hesitantly, before she has all of her words in order, “when I press record… we simply have to… you know… _talk_ about it, about everything that led up to the Corruption Song, sparing no detail.”

“Simple, is it?” Blue Diamond asks quietly, and there is slight admonishment in the question, ancient sadness in her geometric eyes, in all the lines and shadows beneath them.

“No,” Pearl replies, glancing away from the screen. “Not at all.”

Loving Pink Diamond was so many things.

It was not, in fact, simple.

“But it’s _important_ ,” she continues, her voice gaining strength, “maybe even necessary for us to at least try to tell our stories as fully as _we_ can because she never felt like she could tell her own.”

“That must have been so lonely for her,” Blue whispers, anguished, the words half-caught in her throat.

Pearl forces herself to look at the diamond portrait again.

To search the other’s expression.

To acknowledge the truth in it.

The love.

The pain.

The love that feels so much _like_ pain.

“It was, I think,” Pearl murmurs. “She wanted to be everyone else but herself—on that day. On all the days afterwards as we recovered the shards of our companions, as we had to fight their corrupted selves. Maybe even until the very end when she became Steven.”

And this, she thinks, is the fundamental truth of Rose Quartz above all, one she doesn’t think she’ll share with the rest of the universe, one she thinks will keep between herself and Steven and now… Blue Diamond.

Rose loved the entire world.

She was moved by it. _Endlessly._

She loathed herself.

And seemingly the entire world—Pearl included— _pedestalized_ her.

“We did that to her,” Blue says, and there’s venom in her voice, an air of admission. She brings her tall hands upwards and spiders them across her face. “We… I… never told her that she was good enough. I required her facets to be perfect and scolded her—punished her—every time she so much as toed our harsh lines.”

“You never told her that you loved her,” Pearl says, and there’s solemnity in her voice, an air of accusation. She clenches her own hands on top of the surface of her notes.

Glyphs interspersed with words.

Pain.

Love.

Grief.

“And when you finally showed that you did,” Pearl continues, closing her eyes at the memory of a world being swallowed in white light, of a sky being rent by the echoes of so many thousands of gems screaming to the same tune of the Diamonds’ feral, wailing song, “you destroyed nearly an entire population to do it… all of you… together.”

“Yes,” Blue Diamond can only utter between the gaps in her fingertips.

There is nothing else she can really say.

No defense against the indefensible.

“This is the story we have to tell,” Pearl finishes unsparingly, and yet, at the very moment she does, she leans backwards in her chair, suddenly exhausted, completely drained, as though she’s already done all the _telling_ and the _reckoning_ and the _processing_ and the _labor._

But she’s only scarcely begun.

They both have.

“Not only for this project… but for ourselves, too. We owe ourselves that, at least—the ability to claim everything that we’ve done.”

“Or”—Blue finally lets her hands fall away from her face, leaving only the carnage of overbright eyes behind—“that has been done to _you_.”

She’s talking about her own atrocities—this Pearl immediately intuits—but Pearl thinks about a different Diamond instead.

A covered mouth.

A hibiscus flower.

And command to never speak of this again.

Because no one can know.

“Yes,” Pearl can only utter.

There is nothing else she can really say.

No defense against the indefensible.

They lapse into silence then, the static from the hologram's particles humming in the still air.

“It’s a tragic story,” Blue Diamond says, “but I believe you're correct… we have to tell it anyway. For that very reason—so other gems will know the truth… and remember it… remember _her._ ”

Pearl slowly reaches forward to grab the Holo-Crystal, her fingers hovering just above the recording mechanism.

“It’s a story about love,” she quietly asserts, renegade defiance in her voice. “About all different kinds of it, really.”

“The good, the bad, and the ugly.”

And so often the ugly.

“It was complicated,” Pearl only says and presses _record_.

It’s not an admission here; she's already admitted to this fact—several times over.

To anyone who will listen.

(No one really does.)

Rather, it's a tiny kindness.

Maybe to Blue Diamond.

Maybe to herself.

And maybe even to the memory of the long dead ghost who sits in the space of the thousands of lightyears between them, hands beneath her chin, smiling gently at some beautiful thing that she just saw.

A flower, perhaps.

A human.

An infinite, changing sky.

A world where she could perhaps learn to love herself in the same way that she loved others.

Entirely.


End file.
